Mobile data communication is evolving quickly because of global communication networks such as the Internet, intranets, laptops, PDAs (personal digital assistants) and increased requirements of workforce mobility. Third generation mobile system (3G) technologies (e.g., UMTS-Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) are considered enhancements to GSM (Global System for Mobile telecommunications) cellular standards. As the demand for increased capacity and speed of mobile telephone networks grows, fourth generation (4G) technologies, for example, Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems are rapidly being developed and implemented. In particular, LTE is a set of enhancements to UMTS that adopt 4G mobile communications technology, including an all-Internet Protocol flat networking architecture.
New technologies are required to deliver high-speed location and mobile terminal specific content to users. With LTE, the user experience can be significantly improved by supporting more demanding applications such as interactive TV, mobile video blogging, advanced games and/or professional services. In capacity terms, LTE meets key 4G requirements, for example, providing downlink peak rates greater than 100 Mbits/sec. Moreover, the LTE architecture is designed to be as simple as possible to deploy and operate, through flexible technology that can be used in a wide variety of frequency bands. In particular, the all-Internet Protocol (IP) network architecture employed by LTE, supports voice in the packet domain, for example, Voice over IP (VoIP), and is extremely efficient for data and/or VoIP traffic.
However, the LTE architecture does not support the circuit-switched architectures found in traditional mobile networks. Thus, Short Message Service (SMS) is not supported by the all-IP LTE architecture. Conventionally proposed solutions for the SMS problem in LTE involve the deployment of a new IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) based delivery that requires new/modified handset clients, new/modified IMS core and IMS messaging applications. An alternate approach proposes circuit switched (CS) fallback that involves modifying existing 2G and 3G mobile switching centers (MSCs) to enable SMS support in LTE. This approach would involve major development and take time to deploy across a large embedded base of MSCs.